Dark matter and dark energy likely.. Both of which are extremely different. Einstein said his "cosmological constant" was his biggest blunder. But it's proving to likely be, one of the biggest discoveries ever..

I fear.. Exponential growth... eesh.. Once dark energy leaves the constrains of dark matter. there will be no opposing force, to slow it down. Therefor the universe will exponentially expand.. Exponentially speeding toward annihilation.. Oh joy..

Dark matter and dark energy likely.. Both of which are extremely different. Einstein said his "cosmological constant" was his biggest blunder. But it's proving to likely be, one of the biggest discoveries ever..

I fear.. Exponential growth... eesh.. Once dark energy leaves the constrains of dark matter. there will be no opposing force, to slow it down. Therefor the universe will exponentially expand.. Exponentially speeding toward annihilation.. Oh joy..

Click to expand...

I can't recall, but I don't think it's a proven fact that

a) the rate of expansion has been uniform over time. IOW, the universe has always been expanding. It's very fabric that is - the zero point field I would assume. But I don't think the rate of acceleration has been constant. I just can't think of anything to search on that would let me narrow it down quickly, plus I'm a little typed out.

b) the rate of expansion is uniform. It may be accelerating, but do we know for a fact that it's accelerating at the same rate everywhere in the universe. That shouldn't be too hard to test, so I assume this both a and b have already been answered. Someone else's turn to contribute.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a new imaging instrument installed on the space telescope in 2002, enabled scientists to turn Hubble into a supernova-hunting machine. Riess led an effort to discover the needed sample of very distant type Ia supernovae by piggybacking on the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. The team found six supernovae that exploded when the universe was less than half its present size (more than seven billion years ago); together with SN 1997ff, these are the most distant type Ia supernovae ever discovered. The observations confirmed the existence of an early slowdown period and placed the transitional “coasting point” between slowdown and speedup at about five billion years ago. This finding is consistent with theoretical expectations and thus is reassuring to cosmologists. Cosmic acceleration was a surprise and a new puzzle to solve, but it is not so surprising as to make us rethink much of what we thought we understood about the universe.

Our Cosmic Destiny
THE ANCIENT SUPERNOVAE also provided new clues about dark energy, the underlying cause of the cosmic speedup. The leading candidate to explain dark energy’s effects is vacuum energy, which is mathematically equivalent to the cosmological constant that Einstein invented in 1917. Because Einstein thought he needed to model a static universe, he introduced his “cosmological fudge factor” to balance the attractive gravity of matter. In this recipe, the constant’s density was half that of matter. But to produce the observed acceleration of the universe, the constant’s density would have to be twice that of matter. Where could this energy density come from? The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics requires that the vacuum be filled with particles living on borrowed time and energy, popping in and out of existence. But when theorists try to compute the energy density associated with the quantum vacuum, they come up with values that are at least 55 orders of magnitude too large. If the vacuum energy density were really that high, all matter in the universe would instantly fly apart and galaxies would never have formed.

An example of the "we don't know as much as we'd like to think we do"
statement I make in the title.

Watching a special right now and the scientist says "To have complex life, like we have on earth, you need oxygen".. ugh.. As if something couldn't simply learn to convert, another gas into fuel, in the same manner..

Dark elements.. Idk, I kind of think of dark matter and dark energy as dark elements. As they were theoretically created, in the very first moment, of the big bang. Where as most complex elements, were made in stars after wards.

If all of the elements in the universe were/are/will be born from the nuclear reactions within stars...

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- Is there another reaction in the universe that can produce different forms of matter? Are there dark elements?

Click to expand...

Thinking about that statement. There are tons of possibilities within that train of thought.. I mean if we have all these visible elements.. We may very well, have just as many, invisible elements. IE "dark" elements.

If prior to the existance of the universe there was nothing but a dark void, and then "nothing" exploded, it would mean that photon were instantaneously created (even though they never existed before) in order to produce light.

So ... following that logic, the big explosion (of nothing) created all kinds of stuff so that the universe could be filled with something to look at.